Disagree. The payouts on Steemit have nothing to do with price directly because there is a fixed payout no matter if there's only 1 post per day or 14k posts per day. The reason the payouts will affect the price of steem is because the entire Steemit platform relies on new blood. New blood won't pay to power up if they are earning $0.01 per post. The new blood reads the posts from a year ago when a popular post could make $1500 and they think they can make money. When reality sets in and they realize they can't make any money without buying in at a high amount (and then taking a big risk that the platform will be around for a year so they can recoup their power up investment), everyone bails and the price tanks.
But more established members are less likely to cashout. The more money you have the less in % you will cashout due to FOMO. Plus it's slow to cashout like 50,000$.
But if you earn 50$ for a mediocre article with 50% SBD/SP payout, you'd bet that that person will cashout that 25$ and gamble the money on some silly casino 7 days afterwards.
Simply put, rich people are more responsible with their money and investments. Sorry but this is the truth.
Bullshit. The whales and dolphin accounts post crappy content all day long so they can get their author and upvote rewards from self-voting + votes from their followers who worship them in false hopes that these large steem power accounts might show some upvote love to their minions.
There is a TON of crappy content every few minutes. There are fake fan pages with NSFW content earning $50 because stupid people still up vote when they see skin. There's stupid memes and recycled Youtube content that is literally just a headline, 3 words and an image or video link making $ because they are posted by high steem power accounts.
It's called subjective value theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_valueIn most people's minds, cat pictures, and other pussy pictures in NSFW are what it is worth.
It is lame that most people don't watch science and educational material, but that is just how people are. Ignorant dumbasses, you will find 1000x more pussy related articles than quantum physics. It's just how people are.
So if people like to blog about their travel experiences or about their romantic life. So be it. Not everyone is a quantum physicist.